


Until Now Gives Way to Then

by CharacteristicallyMinor



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Backstory, Desert Bluffs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 02:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7203014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharacteristicallyMinor/pseuds/CharacteristicallyMinor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Carlos was a child, his dad told him stories of his hometown, a strange place with paranormal creatures and a casual relationship to the laws of physics.</p><p>When Carlos is an adult, he moves to Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until Now Gives Way to Then

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "It All Comes Back" from the musical Fun Home.

“Daddy!” Carlos said, “Tell me another story about your hometown!”

“Alright, Carlos,” his daddy said, “but you’re going to have to get ready for bed very quickly first. Can you do that?”

Carlos ran off to brush his teeth. 

Once Carlos was tucked in to bed, his dad said, “Do you want to hear about the time a librarian got loose?”

“Yes!” Carlos agreed. The librarian stories were the scariest, but Carlos was a big boy and he wasn’t going to have nightmares this time. 

Carlos had the coolest daddy in the whole wide world. His dad came from a town where everything was crazy. The librarians were monsters, the squirrels were government agents, and sometimes the days of the week went out of order. 

His mommy didn’t think his daddy’s stories were real. She said that his daddy was a very good storyteller, but that Carlos needed to remember that they were just stories. But Carlos knew that they were true.

Someday, Carlos thought, he was going to find his daddy’s hometown. It sounded nice. Carlos would be very happy if Wednesdays were sometimes cancelled, since Wednesdays were a gym day and he hated gym. And if they lived in his daddy’s hometown, his daddy wouldn’t have to work so often. His daddy was a music teacher, but he spent a lot of time working for the teacher’s union. He’d told Carlos that his hometown didn’t have unions because the government was very good at making sure that all workers were treated fairly, or at least equally unfairly. His daddy never told him why he’d left, but Carlos would figure out how to get back there.

* * *

When Carlos first gets the grant to go to Night Vale, he doesn’t think to compare it to his dad’s stories. As an adult scientist, he tries not to think about his dad’s past. As a man of science, he can’t go around believing in a town where scientific laws are treated as suggestions. But as his father’s son, he can’t just disbelieve the stories entirely and assume his dad had been crazy. And thus, Carlos compromises by just not thinking about his dad’s hometown.

Night Vale doesn’t seem too strange on paper, so it doesn’t trigger those memories at first. It seems like just another research opportunity, albeit an incredibly promising one. 

The day Carlos actually arrives in Night Vale, however, he can’t stop thinking of his dad’s stories. Night Vale has a very casual attitude towards physics and common sense. When Carlos’s representative from the Sheriff’s secret police warns him about librarians, Carlos knows that he must have somehow found his dad’s hometown.

Well, “knows” is too strong a word. Carlos is a scientist, and scientists never claim to know something without indisputable evidence that it’s true. Technically, Carlos could have found a very similar town to his dad’s hometown, populated by the same types of paranormal phenomena. But his dad had been very clear that his hometown is the only town of its kind on this continent. By Occam’s razor, the simpler answer is most likely to be correct. The idea that Night Vale and his dad’s hometown are the same town is simpler than the idea that there are two secret towns filled with paranormal activity in roughly the same geographic area that don’t know about each other. As such, Carlos decides to accept the hypothesis that Night Vale is his dad’s hometown.

Carlos is tempted to ask around for information about his dad, but he knows that that would be dangerous. He still doesn’t know why his dad was driven out of town in the first place, or what had happened when he came back. Carlos doesn’t want to be reeducated or locked up in the mine shaft if it turns out that his dad wasn’t on good terms with the government.

Still, Carlos keeps an ear out for anyone with the same last name as him. He doesn’t have any living grandparents or aunts and uncles, but his dad could have cousins out there somewhere. It would be easier to find relatives if Carlos made his last name public knowledge, but he remembers his dad telling him repeatedly that names have power. It was why Carlos had never learned the name of his dad’s hometown, and he figures the same premise held true with his own last name. 

Carlos hates the fact that information about his dad could be in his reach within a few hours if he just pursued it, but the saying that “curiosity killed the cat” is very literal in Night Vale, if “the cat” is a euphemism for the Sheriff’s Secret Police. (To be very clear, “the cat” is not on the approved list of euphemisms for the Sheriff’s Secret Police, and thus should not be used as such outside the temporary security of your own mind.) Carlos likes living, and so he doesn’t indulge his curiosity.

* * *

Carlos and his parents were driving to his grandma’s house. She lived an hour away, and they had to drive through a bunch of farms to get to her town.

“It must be weird, living so far away from other people,” Carlos said. “Farmers must be very lonely.”

“That’s not always true,” his dad said. “My family lived on a farm, and we weren’t lonely. We were still a part of the community, we just had to drive a little farther.”

“Really?” Carlos asked, surprised. “I thought you lived out in the desert! What did you grow?”

“We didn’t grow anything. We had a windmill farm,” his dad said. “We collected power from the wind.”

“Wow!” Carlos said. “Your town was so cool!” 

“It had its moments,” his dad said, sounding nostalgic. “But it had its downsides here, too. The ban on sunglasses was very inconvenient.”

Carlos’s mom changed the subject, even though Carlos wanted to hear more about his dad’s town.

* * *

Carlos develops a reputation among his colleagues for being really good at adapting to Night Vale. He’s the one they call if they need to decide if the semi-sentient green fog is the type of thing they can just ignore or if they need to run screaming indoors and bolt all the doors and windows. 

Carlos is by no means perfect at navigating Night Vale, but he has good instincts. He makes sure to always have the radio on, since that’s the main source of news in the town. He checks with his local Sheriff’s Secret Police representative if he’s concerned that something might be illegal. His assigned watchers from the Sheriff’s Secret Police start warning him if it looks like he’s about to do something illegal, and he makes sure to return that trust by never repeating a mistake. He develops a pretty good relationship with them, since he makes sure that his coworkers don’t violate any laws and convinces them to submit to impromptu search and seizure with friendly compliance. He’s proud of the fact that he’s adapted to Night Vale much quicker than the average outsider. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Carlos has a perfect track record. He’s frankly a little embarrassed about telling Cecil to evacuate the radio station, although he still feels that his breakdown over time not being real is warranted. His dad had mentioned the flexibility of time before, but it hadn’t sunk in until now just how weird it was going to be, living in a town where time isn’t real. 

Night Vale’s also changed somewhat since his dad’s time living there. Sunglasses aren’t banned any more, and for some reason no one’s willing to admit that there were ever windmill farms. Carlos isn’t sure if that’s because it’s forbidden history or because the history was changed by time travel, but he doesn’t enquire further.

* * *

Carlos’s class was doing a unit on families, and so they were all going to make family trees. His teacher was going to hang up all the family trees around the classroom. Carlos’s friends were all excited for the project, but Carlos wasn’t.

Carlos had a problem. On his mom’s side, he had his grandparents as well as all of his aunts and uncles and cousins. But his dad’s side was blank. He didn’t even know his grandparents’ names.

“Dad, can you at least tell me their names?” Carlos asked. “Don’t say names have power like you always do. I know that names have power, but grade school family trees don’t have power.”

“Alright, Carlos,” his dad said, surprising him. “I suppose you’re old enough. My parents were Aitana and Lautaro. My siblings were Gael, Dante, Candela, Milagros, Franco, Regina, Ximena, and Morena.”

“That’s eight aunts and uncles! Did they all pass away?” Carlos asked. He knew that his dad didn’t have any family left, but he couldn’t imagine eight siblings all dying. He was an only child, so he couldn’t imagine having that many siblings at all.

“They did,” his dad said. “Is there anything else you need to know?”

“Did any of them have children?” Carlos asked.

“No,” his dad said. “They were all too young. Well, except for Regina, but she was only barely old enough when the neckties revolted.”

“That’s everything I need for my project, then,” Carlos said, deciding not to ask about the neckties. “I’m really sorry that they’re all dead.”

“Death’s a part of life,” his dad said. “And my hometown was never the safest place.”

* * *

Carlos is pretty sure he’s handling the Cecil situation very poorly. By the Cecil situation, Carlos means the fact that Cecil has proclaimed himself to be in love with Carlos. Well, in love isn’t the right way to describe it. Cecil doesn’t know Carlos well enough to be in love with him. But Cecil is in love with the idea of Carlos, an idea mostly cobbled together from his physical appearance and a few brief meetings. 

And Carlos has no idea how he feels about Cecil. Carlos barely knows the man, even if hearing him on the radio has created a false sense of familiarity with him. Normally, Carlos thinks he might like to get to know Cecil. Cecil’s pretty attractive, has a decent personality, and makes Carlos laugh. That’s not enough for Carlos to declare himself to be in love with Cecil, but it would normally be enough to make him want to go on a first date with Cecil.

But Cecil’s feelings for Carlos are so much stronger than Carlos’s feelings for Cecil, and it seems like that’s a bad basis for an even relationship. So Carlos doesn’t flirt back, and he always clarifies that he’s not calling for personal reasons.

It didn’t matter, anyways. Carlos knows how bad of an idea dating in Night Vale is. What if Cecil is killed by the Street Cleaners? As it is, Carlos feels a little jolt of fear every time he sees Cecil wearing a tie and remembers the necktie revolt. Night Vale has a terribly high death rate, and so dating anyone is only setting himself up for constant worry eventually followed by expected yet overwhelming grief. It just isn’t a good idea.

It’s hard not to be tempted, though, whenever Cecil lovingly mentions him on air.

* * *

“You know how in Narnia, the kids go from the normal world to Narnia through a wardrobe?” Carlos asked his dad. “Well, is that how you get to your hometown? You go through a portal like that?”

“Sometimes,” his dad said. “In general, our town didn’t really welcome outsiders, so people from the rest of the world rarely found their way in. When they did, it was never intentional on their part.”

That made Carlos unhappy. He wanted to go visit his dad’s hometown, and he’d hoped that it was just a matter of checking their whole house very carefully for a portal. 

“Will it be easier for me to go there, though, since you’re from there?” Carlos asked hopefully.

“Carlos, you shouldn’t try to go to my hometown. It’s not safe there,” his dad said. “If you’re meant to be there, you might be called there and not given a choice in the matter, but I hope to God that you aren’t.”

“Why?” Carlos asked. “After hearing all of your stories, I’m ready to take on the town.”

“Never think that. It’s when you start to feel comfortable in the town that it gets you,” his dad said. “Your mother was right. I made a mistake, telling you so much about my town. I should have let it stay in the past, where it can’t hurt you.”

His dad stopped telling Carlos stories about his hometown, even though Carlos begged and protested and made a presentation about why he deserved to hear more. After a while, Carlos started to forget the details of his dad’s hometown’s strangeness.

* * *

After Carlos almost dies in the bowling alley, he decides that he’s sick of protecting himself from heartbreak. The uneven power dynamic caused by Cecil’s stronger feelings is still an issue, but it seems like less of one. As he was being revived, Carlos heard Cecil crying over his death. Carlos kept himself from getting too close to Cecil, and he still caused that.

Night Vale will never be a safe place. Safety is an illusion. Carlos can’t prevent himself from breaking Cecil’s heart by dying someday, as his dad broke his family’s hearts with his death by Night Vale. But even if they remain platonic acquaintances, Cecil’s still going to mourn his death. And if he’s going to break Cecil’s heart by inevitably dying, he might as well make sure they get time together while they’re alive to compensate for that.

The depth of Cecil’s feelings for him still scares him. He doesn’t feel the same way back, and he doesn’t know if he will. But Carlos isn’t the type to run from things that scare him. He’s a Night Vale citizen, by choice and by heritage. Night Vale citizens aren’t afraid to get on with their lives in the midst of all the dying and chaos, and so Carlos won’t be, either.

With that in mind, Carlos texts Cecil to ask if he can meet him at the Arby’s parking lot.

* * *

“I’m going to be gone for a little while, Carlos,” his dad said. “My old hometown is having issues with a corporation, and I’m going to try to help.”

“Really?” Carlos asked, unable to conceal his surprise even through the phone. “I thought you couldn’t go back?”

“Circumstances have changed,” his dad said. “I have changed, too. My town is in desperate need of my skills in union organization and marching band conducting, and I am far enough removed from my time there that memories that were once painful are now tinged with nostalgia.”

“I don’t know what that means, but okay,” Carlos said. “Do you want me to come with? I could probably get a few days off of school, and I’d love to see where you grew up.”

“No,” his dad said, suddenly growing serious. “I don’t know how this is going to turn out. It may go very poorly indeed. I want you to stay safe. Do not follow me. Do not ask questions. Do not even think about where I have gone. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Carlos said. “But-“ 

His dad hung up before Carlos could continue his question. That was the last time Carlos heard from him.

* * *

When StrexCorp comes to Night Vale, Carlos views them the same way he views other Night Vale hazards. They’re creepy and clearly evil, of course, but most things that come to Night Vale are creepy and clearly evil. Most things that are already in Night Vale are creepy and clearly evil. Night Vale thrives on evilness and creepiness. 

Carlos remembers that his dad had disappeared because his hometown was having trouble with a corporation, but it doesn’t seem significant. They are many corporations that treat their workers poorly, and this is presumably not the first corporate takeover that Night Vale has faced. 

Carlos would have asked Cecil about it, but it isn’t safe to have actual conversations when StrexCorp could be listening. 

Carlos figures out that StrexCorp is going to be an actual issue when their control over the station lasts more than a couple of weeks, and they keep getting more sinister. He doesn’t know how to help Cecil, though, so he waits until the opportunity arises and tries to support Cecil outside of work in the meantime.

Then, StrexCorp holds a mandatory, fifteen minute long ceremony to celebrate their expansion into Night Vale. It’s held before sunrise so as to not cut into work hours, and is a mixture of corporate platitudes and praise for the Smiling God. It concludes with the Desert Bluffs marching band playing what might have been a hymn to the Smiling God.

Carlos would be fine dealing with all that and treated it as a nonthreatening annoyance, but Carlos sees the marching band’s uniforms. They’re scorched and covered in blood stains. After trying to rationalize for a few minutes, Carlos realizes something that he should have known a long time ago.

Carlos’s dad hadn’t come from Night Vale. He was from Desert Bluffs, from an era before Strex Corp took over their town. The subtle inconsistencies- the lack of windmill farms, the nonchalance towards neckties, the legality of sunglasses- weren’t just due to the changing nature of the town; they were due to the fact that his dad had never lived in Night Vale. The corporation that came to take over the town must have been StrexCorp. His dad must have led the marching band in a revolt, and died in the attempt.

Carlos’s desire to get those StrexCorp bastards out of his town suddenly amplifies. He’d wanted them gone for the sake of Cecil’s happiness, before. But now he’s afraid for the town’s safety. If StrexCorp took over all of Desert Bluffs, then they could take over all of Night Vale.

* * *

It takes a while for Carlos’s dad to be declared dead. 

When his dad decided to go on the business trip, he hadn’t known how long it was going to take. A few days to a couple of months is a broad range. They’d known that communicating with the outside world is almost impossible in his hometown, and so they hadn’t expected an update. There was no reason to think anything was wrong, when they didn’t hear from him at first. 

After three months with no answer, they became concerned. An extra month could have been the result of the union work taking longer than expected, but more than that was concerning. Not concerning enough to get the police involved, but concerning enough that they started to pray.

After six months with no answer, they had a family meeting and decided that something had almost definitely happened. His dad couldn’t be assumed to be fine for any longer. There was nothing they could do to pursue it. The police wouldn’t know what to do with the situation. But they started talking about him in the past tense, from then on.

They held a funeral at the beginning of month eight. It was time, even though they had an empty casket and no answers.

* * *

After StrexCorp is overthrown, Carlos isn’t that surprised when he’s thrown out of Night Vale. His heritage lies with Desert Bluffs, and Night Vale has just succeeded in driving out Desert Bluffs. It wouldn’t be a success if Carlos wasn’t also driven out.

While Carlos is trapped in the desert otherworld, he talks to Kevin sometimes. He hates Kevin, but Kevin’s also his only source of information about Desert Bluffs as it once was.

Kevin doesn’t want to talk about the past, but he wants to win over Carlos more than anything, and bribing him with information is his best way of doing that. Carlos knows that, and he bargains on it working long enough for him to find out about his family.

The work is excruciatingly slow. Carlos can’t just ask about his dad; Kevin would find some way to use that information against him. So instead, Carlos sets out learning the life story of every former Desert Bluffs resident, sorted by workplace. It starts out as a means to an end, but he finds himself taking notes. Desert Bluffs isn’t really his town, but his family came from there, and that counts for something. 

Once Carlos knows a little bit about of every former worker at the ice cream place, sewage department, Bavarian restaurant, and shoelace store, he finally starts working through school employees.

“So that’s it for the gym teachers. What about the marching band directors?” Carlos asks, careful to not let any emotion slip through his voice.

“Oh, we haven’t had one of those in years. Actually, one came at around the time I came to know the Smiling God’s toothy embrace. Marco Ramirez, his name was. He’d lived in Desert Bluffs before, but he left when he angered a mob of land sharks,” Kevin recalled. “He must have made some sort of deal with them to be allowed back. Anyways, he didn’t last long. He was a negative workplace influence and encouraged bad habits and laziness in those around him, so HR had to do some work erasing the damage he’d done.”

Carlos doesn’t let his expression change. Doesn’t react to hearing his dad’s name spoken aloud for the first time since he came to Night Vale. Doesn’t react to hearing about his dad’s death. Instead, trying to keep his voice steady, he asks, “land sharks?”

“Y’know,” Kevin says. “Land sharks.”

“Right,” Carlos says, feeling faintly ill.

That’s the first and only time Carlos’s dad is mentioned. He knows what happened to his dad, and he finds he doesn’t really want the gory details. He keeps going through the list of Desert Bluff residents, even though he got the information he wanted. He feels a duty to hear about them, to remember the ones that don’t have family to remember them.

Carlos still wants to go back to Night Vale, but he suspects he’ll never be allowed to.

* * *

“Remember those stories dad used to tell, about his old hometown?” Carlos asked his mom. He was home from grad school for Christmas and feeling nostalgic.

“How could I forget?” his mom asked, with a laugh. “You were obsessed with them for years. Wouldn’t accept anything else as a bedtime story.”

“I wonder why he told them,” Carlos said. “Was his past really that bad, that he wasn’t willing to talk about it at all?”

“Everyone copes with grief differently. I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to imagine a past that wasn’t filled with dead siblings, or a town that was happier even though it was more dangerous,” his mom speculated. 

“Y’know, I always thought you hated the stories,” Carlos said.

“At the time, I thought they were too dark for you to hear. The librarians gave you nightmares so many times. I didn’t really mind them when you were older, although he stopped telling them anyways,” his mom admitted. She paused for a second before saying, “Hell, sometimes I wonder if the stories were true. He sounded so confident about them, and he was never inconsistent in what he told you.”

“You really don’t know anything about his past?”

“I really don’t know anything,” his mom confirmed. “He told me that his parents and siblings were all dead, and I never pushed him. If he didn’t want to relive whether happened to him in the past, then I wasn’t going to make him.”

“I don’t know why he went back to his hometown,” Carlos said.

“I don’t, either. I know that he was certain he had to, and that he desperately didn’t want to. He hid that from you, but he couldn’t hide it from me,” his mom said. “I think he felt a sense of duty, to them.”

Carlos wanted to ask why that trumped his dad’s duty to his wife and son, but didn’t. His dad had been gone for years, and it would be pointless to tarnish his memory by resenting him for leaving.

* * *

Carlos returns to Night Vale right after he hears about the last Desert Bluff resident Kevin can recall. In retrospect, it feels a little obvious that he needed to complete his project before being allowed to return. 

When Carlos comes home to Night Vale, he wonders whether he should tell Cecil about his heritage. Honesty is important in relationships. But honesty is also dangerous.

Cecil hates Desert Bluffs. He hates Desert Bluffs even more than he hates Steve Carlsberg, which is really saying something. Carlos doesn’t blame him. Cecil only knows Desert Bluffs as the headquarters and hometown of StrexCorp. 

And so Carlos remains quiet when Cecil talks about Desert Bluffs, and Carlos doesn’t tell Cecil about his dad.

Then Desert Bluffs merges with Night Vale.

Desert Bluffs collapsed without StrexCorp. Carlos isn’t surprised. StrexCorp was responsible for the town’s economy and for keeping the populace docile with untested, extremely powerful pharmaceuticals. He didn’t think about the survivors much before, except to vaguely hope that they were okay. He probably should have done more. But he didn’t, and what’s past is prologue.

Carlos hires a couple of Desert Bluffs residents for his lab. He befriends a few more and spends long hours collecting an oral history of the town before StrexCorp came. 

They didn’t worship a smiling god, before StrexCorp came, but most of them continued to do so after StrexCorp left. Partially habit, partially real belief that developed over the years. 

Cecil is wary of the Desert Bluffs citizens, at first. But he doesn’t question Carlos’s decisions. And slowly, Cecil starts to warm up to the Desert Bluffs citizens.

Carlos still doesn’t tell Cecil about his dad. But he thinks he will, someday.


End file.
